2010

Contra Costa Times' Obsession With Occupy Wall Street/Oakland

October 28, 2011 - San Francisco CA - PipeLineNews.org - Heavy coverage of the Occupy Oakland movement, featured prominently in the last two editions of the Contra Costa Times, reveals the paper's heavy handed, concerted push to support this revolutionary, neo-communist uprising.

So brazenly biased is the newspaper's coverage, one must assume that its ongoing narrative had to have been approved at the highest editorial levels [such as they are] at this San Francisco Bay Area daily newspaper.

The facts are as follows - over this 24 hour period, the CC Times devoted well over 300 column inches [computation based on number of columns in this 6 column format newspaper multiplied by the length of each column in inches] to this effort. This amount of coverage on a single [non-disaster] issue is pretty much unprecedented, especially given this newspaper's plummeting page count.

PipeLineNews.org's investigation into the motivating ideology behind Occupy Oakland and by extension, its parent, Occupy Wall Street, revealed it to be of neo-communist origin with a latent capacity for extreme violence [see, Occupy Oakland October 19, 2011, Taste The Madness].

So compelling is this evidence that any journalist should be able to draw a similar conclusion. That this doesn't happen at the Contra Costa Times and other Bay Area News Group products simply reveals that these organizations made the decision to cheerlead Occupy Oakland/OWS despite the obvious damage that such blatant bias may cause these periodicals long term.

What motivates a community newspaper to champion a movement whose organizers certainly hope will prove to be an existential threat to capitalism and Western democratic principles?

The most reasonable explanation is that the Contra Costa Times' editorial staff and the journalists it employs share much of OWS' driving ideology and therefore instead of merely covering the events surrounding the movement, the size of which pales in comparison to that of the Tea Party, they act as pamphleteers for the movement, not reporters. They have become stenographers for the hard left.

This newspaper has a lot to answer for regarding its ongoing and seemingly increasing leftwing bias. Perhaps the Contra Costa Times' advertisers need to be informed as to exactly what is going on. They may displeased to find their advertising carrier doesn't really seem to support the basic idea of capitalist commerce upon which these businesses depend.